Battlefield and Sky
by Empatheia
Summary: -Neji, Hinata- There's a war on. They have until sunrise to stitch up their tattered seams, slow the worst of the bleeding, and tie up what loose ends are left within reach.


_**Battlefield and Sky**_

There's a war on.

Neji lies flat on his back and stares up at the wartime sky. It shouldn't look any different. The wind doesn't care, the moon doesn't care, nothing up there cares that the ground below is rank with red and iron. But somehow, the stars do look a little sharper, their light a little crueller to his eyes. The space between is a harsher black.

Everything hurts. He only bothers to notice it dimly, a swamp of muddy pain-colours sucking at his limbs. Everything hurts most of the time anyway. Even when there's no war, what's there in its place is always far from peace. He is always fighting. He is always bleeding. Paying attention to it helps nothing.

Somewhere off to his left, lost among the sprawl of gasping wounded, he can feel Hinata. She is worse off than he is, but not because she was weaker. Half of those wounds she received by using herself as a shield between her comrades and the enemy. He had watched her gather a hundred daggers in her arms and been helpless, too far away to protect her back, only able to catch glimpses of her bleeding and staggering through the gaps.

How had he ever thought her a coward? But then again, he isn't entirely sure knives or pain frighten her all that much. Even as a small child, it seems to him now that she had always been trying to throw herself on the nearest sword, so that no one else could take it up against her later. At least that way, she could decide where it would strike, how much damage it would do. Perhaps that was how she survived.

She feared failing her comrades far more than she feared failing herself. Perhaps she was still, in her own way, a coward.

He grins at the thought, an unhappy expression. Her brand of cowardice had saved at least a dozen lives today, and had probably saved even more yesterday, when she was still at her best.

Coward or not, she was a hero, so it didn't matter.

The wind is not cold, but there is a keen edge to it that slides under his clothes, under his skin. Neji shivers despite himself and tries to make himself sit up. The medic nins, so pitifully few in number now, have triaged the field and are working their way through. It will take them a long time to get to him, and he will be lucky if they have anything left by the time they do.

Better to help himself, and take at least a little of the burden off of them.

"Hinata," he calls out in a cracked voice, his throat raw from the shattered-glass desert wind. The night carries the word away, useless. "Hinata," he tries again, and this time there's a little real power to it, just enough for her to hear him over the space between.

Her voice is ruined, too, but he strains to hear and barely catches the thin thread of her voice wavering through the air.

"Neji?"

When had she stopped adding the honourific to his name? When had he stopped adding hers? It can't have been that long ago. It still feels strange. But for the life of him, he can't remember. Haven't they always been too tired, too broken to bother with them? Hasn't the sky always been this cold?

He recognizes the delerium creeping up on him and drives his nails into the palms of his hands, allowing that small, sharp new pain through in order to wake him up and keep him steady.

Somehow, he pulls his stiff wreck of a body upright and crawls along that thin thread toward her. She meets him halfway, somehow, dragging her left leg and putting very little weight on her right arm.

Somehow, somehow, she manages a smile when their eyes meet, eyes rueful and fogged with dust and pain.

"I'll bandage you," he says.

She opens her mouth to protest, to insist that he is cared for first, but he glares for a moment, not angrily, and she closes it again. Meekly, she lays down before his knees, ready to bite her sleeve when he sets that dislocated knee. He works as quickly as his exhausted body and numb fingers will allow, but it's still too slow, much too slow. Her torment drags on and on into the witching hours.

When at last he is finished, her pale Hyuuga eyes, the eyes they share, are bloodshot with the effort of restraining herself and her cheeks are wet with involuntary tears, but she hadn't made a sound. Many of the wounded around them are taking the opportunity to sleep, to take what small, uneasy rest the rocky field and roofless sky can give them. She would not wake them, not for something as unimportant as her own suffering.

She sits with her hands on the ground before her, head down and hair in disarray, struggling to find her breath.

"Hinata," he says.

She manages to look up at him, the question her throat cannot bear glowing from her eyes instead.

Suddenly, he forgets what he wanted to say. Something kind, he thinks. Something to make her feel something warm amid all this cold, congealing wasteland of carnage. What was it?

He can't bring it back. His throat hurts anyway. So instead, he reaches out to pull her down and cradle her shaking patchworked body against his. He has very little warmth to share, as does she, but between them the night feels a little softer around the edges.

"I need to treat your wounds," she rasps against his chest.

"I'm fine," he says.

He can feel her frown, though he can't properly see it. "You're not," she said. "You can't help me and then expect me to let you suffer on your own. Please, lie down."

Reluctantly, because she is warm and because he feels like he's almost grasped the corner of that thing he wanted to say again, he lets go and sinks back into the stones and dust.

She is quicker than him, possibly because her arms are supported by the bandages so that her wounds cannot gape open and sting in the wind as his did. He cries too, silently, when she rubs something into the gash on his back that feels cold for a moment, then burns like fire, purifying and cauterizing. He hardly feels the stitches through that. A small, backhanded kindness.

And then, rag-doll bodies tied together with tape and strings, they curl up in the dirt together and dread the sunrise, feeling very small and lost on the vast and gloomy plain.

He tries to remember what it had felt like to hate her, back when he was young and the world was so much smaller and brighter. The memory is so faded, now. He catches a ragged glimpse of some things: a red and blinding resentment, a yearning to be seen and recognized as something worthwhile, black scorn for how pitifully, humiliatingly weak she had been.

Older now, and much grown, he finds himself turning that old scorn on himself. As much as he had wanted someone to see him, he had refused to look at her, really _see _her. How might things have been different if he had found even a scrap of humility or compassion a little earlier?

He almost killed her, once, he remembers, too, though this memory he does not want to see again. Consumed by the rage born of his senseless arrogance, he had seen only an obstacle, stupid and spineless and occupying all that exalted space he knew was his by right.

In his chest, his heart trembles a little at how close it had been. If Naruto hadn't been there to call out that first dazzling moment of courage in her, if she hadn't heard him, if she had chosen not to listen, or simply failed to find and grasp that sleeping strength… if he'd been even one ounce more determined….

Ah, that was it. Now he remembers.

"Hinata," he says, pressing his fingers into her back to bring her closer, just a bit closer, just a fraction of an inch would be enough.

"Neji?" she replies wearily. Her voice is just a soft mumble lost in his chest, but he recognizes the shape of his name.

"I'm sorry," he says.

There is a long pause. She goes still, but does not push him away or withdraw. He feels light as dust, as if the wind might pick him up and send him tumbling away at a moment's whim. He hadn't known how heavy that tumour in his chest had been until he cut it out and left it to shrivel under the wartime stars. The stones they lie on are lighter by far.

Then, at last, she lets out a gentle little sigh. For a moment, he is sure she is going to apologize, too, somehow, for some perceived fault made up on the spot, because she has never been able to admit when others have wronged her.

"I forgive you," she says then, and Neji realizes that somewhere along their long, thorny road, she has surpassed him and become an adult and a warrior and even more unbearably kind, and he never noticed. He had assumed she would always be walking one step behind him, in his shadow. Foolishly.

He doesn't know what to say. But wait, no, he does. Of course he does. There's only one thing that could fit within the shape of the new and raw cavity inside him where the tumour had been.

"Thank you."

And then there is quiet, though not silence. There can never be silence under a sky like this. The wind will keen, and the wounded will grind their teeth, and the thunderous bass drums of war will rumble beneath them. But there is quiet, and despite the sky, it is gentle.

The war can wait for the dawn.


End file.
